Reverse: 1999 ("重返未来：1999" in Chinese, where the Chinese means something like "Back To The Future") is a Gaslamp Fantasy adventure Gacha Game with a turn-based card-theme battle system by Bluepoch for iOS, Android, and PC. The game released in the mainland China region on May 31st, 2023 and globally on October 26, 2023.
On the last day of 1999, "The Storm" ascended from the ground up into the sky, distorted reality, and wiped the entire era and its people from existence. Vertin, the "Timekeeper" (the final witness of an era) searches for the truth behind "The Storm."
But the truth she seeks is concealed between an ages long war between the St. Pavlov Foundation (a human-run institution that raises and indoctrinates Arcanists as tools to serve the peace of humanity) and the Manus Vindictae (a group of Arcanists who are determined to restore Arcanists to their former glory, that being as rulers of the world).
Tropes present in Reverse: 1999:
- Aerith and Bob: Character names are all over the place, from normal somehwere in the world (Matilda, Leilani, An-an Lee) to what are probably aliases or nicknames (Eternity, Sweetheart, Necrologist, The Fool), to what we call "Word Salad" (Balloon Party, Bunny Bunny, Medicine Pocket, Twins Sleepnote ). There are also some names with strange capitalization (APPLe, aliEn T, ONiON) and one that's even in Cyrillic instead of a Latin alphabet (Зима, which is pronounced "Zima" and is Russian for "Winter").
- Alternate Universe: The setting is based on one where magic and magical creatures are in our world, alongside a Mage Species called Arcanists - surprisingly, before the "Storm", the world's history was essentially identical to our own, despite magic being common knowledge.
- Anachronism Stew: Chapter 5 takes place in 2007, in Apeiron, an island still living as Pythagoreans. They wear togas, have bizarre legal codes based on ancient Greek traditions, research math on all it's forms while also having an IDM super computer collecting dust in a cave.
- Animate Inanimate Object: The "Awakened" is a group of magic users who are inanimate objects that are granted sapience and the ability to use magic like human Arcanists, such as an apple and a radio.
- Audience Surrogate: Vertin is set up as one from a gameplay perspective (but not a story one, as she has her own characterization). She's almost always offscreen since you're in her shoes; story scenes will have characters address the camera and Vertin will reply from your perspective, and she's not a playable character since she is/you are the one directing everyone else.
- Bag of Holding: Vertin's suitcase holds at least a whole building and some surrounding environments. It serves as the base of operations for the player.
- "Blind Idiot" Translation: The official English translation that released on the Global server is...not great: stilted dialogue, missing articles, at times completely incoherent sentences. Which is a bit of a problem, considering how heavily the story and worldbuilding is featured. The translation is very recent, so it might improve over time.
- Brainwashing for the Greater Good: What the Foundation sees as their role. They take in Arcanist children and drill into them their "proper" role in the world, imparting in them that they exist to bring "Peace and Prosperity." There is even an age cutoff when an Arcanist is considered "too old" to go through the system since those kids would have more solid memories of their lives before the Foundation took them in and have more fully formed opinions. Given that previously most humans only saw Arcanists as enemies of mankind and tried across history to wipe them out, this is technically an improvement...
- Damage Typing: Three types - Reality damage (the game's equivalent to physical), Mental damage (the game's equivalent to magic), and Genesis damage, which tends to bypass resistances.
- Died in Your Arms Tonight: Schneider dies in Vertin's arms after Arcana forces Vertin to shoot her. This is actually a fake out, but the trope sticks the next time it happens at the end of chapter 2.
- Ditzy Genius: Sotheby tends to have her head in the clouds and acts rather childish, but is one of the best alchemists in the world.
- Downer Ending:
- The ending of Chapter 2: Despite Vertin's best efforts, and despite beating Forget Me Not, they're unable to resolve the fundamental causes of the Storm and it's doomed to arrive and erase the 1920s, all that Vertin can do is give the non-Arcanists doomed to be erased a last meal.
- Chapter 3, a flashback to Vertin's time in the care of the St. Pavlov Foundation, ends on the children's escape from the school having been figured out and manipulated so that every child who decided to escape with the exception of Vertin falls victim to the Storm just to teach Vertin a lesson.
- Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: A staple of the genre, though here the elements are called Afflatus and fight each other in this order: Mineral -> Beast -> Plant -> Star -> Mineral. The Light/Dark equivalents are good against one another, though they are respectively Intelligence and Spirit here.
- Even the Girls Want Her: In fact, primarily the girls want her: being the protagonist of a gacha game and a well-groomed Bifauxnen gives Vertin a lot of attention from the majority-female cast. This is also displayed in the main story, in which Schneider steals a kiss from Vertin at the end of Chapter 2 - which should be noted, is something that is extremely rare to see in a gacha game.
- Evil Versus Evil: The Foundation doesn't see Arcanists as real people and while they claim to be dedicated to the protection of Arcanists around the world, this mostly takes the form of putting them into orphanages (with the hint that it's not always voluntary) where they are indoctrinated into becoming tools for their agendas to serve the "Greater Good" (greater good for humanity of course). Arcana also seems to believe that it was the Foundation who created the Storm. On the other hand, Manus aren't really any better, being that they are Arcanist supremacists who always show up to make things worse for everyone, including random civilians and all of them show great pleasure in inducing suffering and pain onto others. In the end, both are incredibly shady groups who snatch up as many Arcanists as they can, and seek to take advantage of the Storm for their own ends.
- Fantastic Racism: It's stated that Arcanists were heavily discriminated by humans, a discrimination that is most evident in the 1920s. One of Vertin and Sonetto's first orders of business is trying to prevent a brutal mass murder of arcanists, perpetuated by non-arcanist gangsters.
- Functional Magic: How Arcanum works, this being a Gaslamp Fantasy world, it makes sense. Much of the arcanists attacks and specialties outside of combat oftentimes involve disciplines like Alchemy (Tennant, for transmuting diamonds and coal into each other and back again), Divination (Matilda, with her crystal ball), and Necromancy (Necrologist, for speaking to the dead).
- Gameplay and Story Integration: In some Story stages, you will be unable to deploy characters who are canonically indisposed in some way. This is seen most prominently in Chapter 4, where Mr. APPLe is currently being swarmed by hungry bugs and needs to be defended, or Sotheby has suffered an accidental Forced Transformation and can't fight normally.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- Especially prominent in Chapter 2. Many times, the Timekeeper's team are separated from each other, and have to fight separate battles in different places, sometimes by themselves. However, because of the way the game's mechanics work, the fight may canonically include characters you don't have yet and thus can't deploy in combat (such as Sotheby), characters who are supposed to be elsewhere or indisposed (such as Sonetto during the Walden speakeasy fights or APPLe when he's poisoned by a fungus), or doesn't even have a playable version on the field (such as Vertin during her 1v1 duel with Schenider at the Walden). You could also potentially pit characters against boss versions of themselves, such pitting Jessica against the final Boss Jessica in A Nightmare At Green Lake.
- The playable members of the Crew all depend on who you have pulled from the summoning wheel or that the game gives you as part of leveling up and story progression. Canonically, Regulus, Sotheby, Lilya, and Druvis III have joined Vertin's Crew at various points in the story and are present for many story events and battles, but you'll never be able to use them unless you were lucky enough to pull them as all four mentioned are 6* characters, very difficult to even acquire without a dedicated banner with pity mechanics, special events like the Golden Threads, or very good luck and a lot of real-life money.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: Storm Syndrome, mass hallucinations and psychotic breaks caused by the Storm's arrival, tends to have dire effects on non-arcanists. Some of them become Doomsayers that the Foundation tries to shunt away to their medical health facilities, others are driven to inadvertently harm or even kill themselves as they hallucinate money and valuables are food, and try to eat them with predictable consequences, and others still are driven to violent rages, lashing out at anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby.
- Gratuitous French: Matilda has a few French lines, most notably her win quote as well as gacha-specific character A Knight.
- Gratuitous Italian: Sonetto, Schneider, and Pavia tend to pepper their dialogue with Italian - Schneider in particular also drops Italian swear words like "Vaffanculo" (Go fuck yourself) in some scenes.
- Gratuitous Russian: Зима's name is untranslated Russian written in Cyrillic (it's pronounced "Zima" and means "Winter"), and he frequently speaks untranslated Russian as well.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: Downplayed heavily, in the prologue you'll be asked to sign the Timekeeper's name, and you can put whatever you want - however, she already has a canonical name, and characters will keep referring to her as Vertin regardless. The name is mostly for the account itself.
- Hypocrite: Iverson of New Humans Security brags that his brand new security guidebook and robots are so meticulous, thorough, and perfect that criminals will just give up upon reading it and seeing them in action, it's so impenetrable and impossible to find loopholes in. By the climax of the Theft of the Rimet Cup, we learn that Iverson illegally put in military grade bullets into his robots among other modifications, just in case, showing that he can't even be trusted to play by the rules of the law.
- Jealous Romantic Witness: Sonetto watches as Schnedier kisses Vertin, gets flustered, and yells at Schneider.
- Jesus Taboo: Completely averted, the game doesn't shy away from mentioning Jesus or the Virgin Mary in dialogues, and Schneider's Italo-American family is implied to be very Catholic.
- Kissing Discretion Shot: Schneider kisses Vertin under her umbrella, as a form of claiming her "reward" after going through the events of Chapter 2.
- Let's You and Him Fight: What Arcana does to Vertin and Schneider in Chapter 2. Using slime that causes hallucinations to pull it off.
- Local Reference: While the game is very much based in the West, with the earliest chapters taking place in London and Chicago, the Chinese devs still nod to their home country in that one of the major protagonists, Miss Z, appears to be ethnically Chinese (best established when she briefly sings to herself in Chinese at the end of Chapter 4).
- Monumental Damage: The background of the official website shows Vertin's group running in the streets of London in the midst of the "Storm" while the Big Ben's Clock Tower is being ripped apart by it.
- Non-Standard Character Design: While the game has plenty of regular human-like character designs, there are also some very weird designs: from a floating talking apple, a girl whose body is contained within four different televisions, an invisible knight who takes the form of a pair of gauntlets and a cape, to talking, sentient objects like a rocking horse, a radio, the Sputnik satellite, or a piece of glass.
- Our Humans Are Different: Arcanists for the most part look and can pass just as regular humans, but they have magic and with it a whole host of psychological issues that can come with it. It's generally said that while humans are stronger, arcanists are clever and unpredictable.
- The Roaring '20s: The first part of the story is set in the USA in 1929, right before The Great Depression. This turns out to be very important, as the Manus intentionally make the stock market crash happen earlier than it should and much more violently to accelerate the arrival of the Storm.
- Shout-Out: In certain intermissions, an unknown, deep-voiced narrator will describe various situations that either Vertin sees, or glimpses of other scenes in pure text form - its tone, its way of speaking, and the fact that one of the first events with said narrator encourage you to drink alcohol is a reference to Disco Elysium, which was a surprise hit in China.
- Surreal Humor: When you have playable characters consisting of a talking apple, a girl trapped in multiple television sets, a UFO abducting a cow, and a freaking shard of mirror simply called Door, then you know you are not playing any normal Gacha Game.
- Spoiled Sweet: Sotheby has cartoonish amounts of wealth and is also one of the sweetest persons you will ever meet.
- Time Crash: This is the nature of the Storm: an accumulation of chaotic arcane energy intensified by turbulent historical events that eventually cause reality itself to break down, culminating in the entire world reverting back in time. Most people of that time are 'sifted out', while a few lucky ones manage to 'Reverse' and survive the crash.
- Tsundere: Matilda towards Sonetto.
- Villain Takes an Interest: Both Schneider and Arcana towards Vertin. With Arcana having tried to snatch up Vertin from the Foundation as early as when she was 12 years old, if not even earlier.
